Event Recap: HP Storage Summit 2013 Toronto

Today was the HP Storage Summit presentation at the Carlu here in Toronto. It was an exciting event with a real focus on partner networking and about the roadmap of the HP Storage leadership team. I’ll start by saying that I was clearly under-dressed for the event :). It seems that the corporate focus drove the dress code up. There seemed to be a large number of partners and VAR folks present and less of the customer and technology consumer side. This wasn’t a bad thing of course.

The Venue

I have to give a thumbs up to the use of The Carlu at 444 Yonge Street here in Toronto. It was my first time attending an event at this spectacular venue. The layout of the common areas, the presentation areas and the audio-visual components was excellent.

When the webcast becomes available on-demand you may get a sense of the room and see just how well it worked for the presentation.

Now that is a serious lineup! Peter provided some background on the progress of HP since the acquisition of 3PAR and how the suite of products in the HP Storage division have grown and advanced as a result. I won’t dive into the numbers, but if you are familiar with HP and 3PAR it goes without saying that the roadmap is positive and the integration has gone well.

David Scott took the stage to present the strategy for HP Storage in 2013 and to talk about what they call “Polymorphic Simplicity“. David came from 3PAR to HP and as a result is very familiar with the entire product line. The focus of the event was clearly towards the mid-range to enterprise-range including the HP 3PAR 7000 Series and the HP 3PAR P10000 Series units.

The big message is about interoperability and ease of migration into and within the platforms. HP is clearly doing everything they can to remove the barriers for data storage and management and widen their offering to cover the whole spectrum of storage and meet customer needs. Lots of talk about ITaaS in both the SMB and at the customer (private cloud) space.

The presentation then moved towards the HP converged storage and network products and strategy. The major towers in the storage portfolio are StoreAll (Big Data style multi-source storage) , StoreOnce (Backup and de-duplication) and StoreVirtual (Appliance style and VSA offering).

Craig Nunes continued the presentation with some enhanced detail on the StoreAll systems including the HP Express Query product which is a NoSQL DB that stores metadata information on the filesystem contents and increases storage intelligence with lightning fast queries. By using the metadata to understand the storage HP is able to profile the data and give better knowledge to the customer to manage that data appropriately.

There was a lot more detail than just what I’ve talked about here, but the key thing I wanted to highlight is that HP and 3PAR have some pretty cool products, and the 2013 roadmap looks exciting. More news will come in June at the HP Discover event and I’m sure that we will be seeing lots from HP at VMworld 2013 as well.

All in all the event was great and I was happy to be able to ask a question to the executive team and to speak with Craig at the end of the event. This was more executive and partner relationship driven than technical, but it was a good view of the HP Storage portfolio and should drive us to take a further look at their offerings.

How to Get More Info on HP Storage

First of all, if you aren’t already following Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy on Twitter) then you need to do so. Calvin has a plethora of great information on his blog: Around the Storage Block. Once the webcast from the event is available online I will post the link here and update on Twitter.

Reach out to your HP Storage representative through your reseller and have a conversation with them and as always you can drop me a line and I’ll be happy to share any of my thoughts and knowledge.